Translation Studies

Translation as Post-Occupational Practice?

Translational agency is being reconfigured. The rapid acceleration of radical socio-economic shifts has brought previously latent dimensions into sharp relief. These realities demand a systematic interrogation of the landscape, moving beyond mere description to address the mutating role of translation practices. The impact of human (individual or collective) non-professional translation, which has already received considerable attention within translation studies, is now systemically compounded by the more recent rise of algorithmic governance and automated labour. This interrogation may revolve, among others, around the critical needs of the post-expertise, post-labour, and post-economic dimensions of translation, seeking to understand how these forces reconfigure the very nature of translational agency.

Post-Expertise: How the rise of non-professional human and algorithmic actors drives "epistemic democratization," challenging traditional institutional authority, gatekeeping, and accreditation models.

Post-Labour: The transition toward "immaterial labour" and autonomous translation activities. We welcome analysis on digital Taylorism and the devaluation of labour alongside the rise of translation as an integrated competency (e.g., the researcher-as-self-translator).

Post-Economy: How generative AI's transformation of cognitive tasks into a low-cost commodity repositions human non-professionals. We seek papers exploring human intentionality as the final frontier of cultural meaning-making and linguistic stewardship.

In light of these transformative shifts, contributions are invited for this special issue to critically engage with the themes of expertise, labour, and the post-economy — although there might be other equally relevant angles. We seek submissions that explore the shifting boundaries of translational agency, the erosion of expert hierarchies, or the reconfiguration of impactful work in a landscape impacted by the interplay between credential and de-credentialed actors.

For a more detailed Call for Papers, please consult the following website: https://cfp-translationstudies.my.canva.site/